Examining the hitherto neglected analogy between the Salem Witchcraft Trials (1692) and the Revolutionary War (1775-83), this paper attempts to illuminate the trajectory from Puritan governors to American presidents, with a special emphasis on the literary tradition of Election Day Sermons. While the Salem Witchcraft Trials were caused by disbelief in the “Foreign Power” as partially represented by the governor Edmund Andros, “The Declaration of Independence” (1776) retrofits the rhetoric of hardcore Puritans attacking the witches and witch-like governors in the previous century, and impeaches King George III for being another invader and plunderer, paving the way for American Presidency. However, it is also true that a glance at the Puritan heritage of Election Day Sermons from Samuel Danforth to Samuel Langdon suggests that Puritan ministers begin to displace their theocratic tone with a more democratic one. Surviving the political upheavals in American history, the spirit of Election Day Sermons transformed Danforth’s concept of “Errand into the Wilderness” into John O’Sullivan’s slogan “Manifest Destiny” (1845), the updated version of the Monroe Doctrine, and another name for imperialist expansionism.

This perspective allows us to reread Nathaniel Hawthorne’s magnum opus The Scarlet Letter (1850) not only for its embedded Election Day sermon but also the novel with its “The Custom-House” preface itself as an incredibly well-wrought romance of the Election Day Sermon. Of course, I am keenly aware that a number of distinguished scholar-critics such as A.W. Plumstead, Sacvan Bercovitch, Alan J. Silva and others have already pointed out the impact of Election Day Sermons on the discourse of Arthur Dimmesdale, the forbidden lover of the heroine Hester Prynne. Indeed, without the heritage of Election Day Sermons, Hawthorne, a close friend of O’Sullivan, could not have described the minister so vividly in Chapter 23, “The Revelation of the Scarlet Letter”: “His subject, it appeared, had been the relation between Deity and the communities of mankind, with a special reference to the New England which they were here planting in the wilderness. ... whereas the Jewish seers had denounced judgments and ruin on their country, it was his mission to foretell a high and glorious destiny for the newly gathered people of the Lord” (Norton 168, italics mine). But what interests me most here is that in producing Dimmesdale’s sermon Hawthorne himself perhaps wanted to express a more contemporary American Jeremiad, in the wake of the presidential election in 1848. For the advent of the new president Zachary Taylor of the Whig party deprived Hawthorne the Democrat of his surveyorship in the Custom House, leading him to narrate the moral panic by means of the metaphor of “guillotine,” with which the members of the victorious have “chopped off all our heads” (31). It is at this moment that Hawthorne’s actual Jeremiad in antebellum America coincides with the fictional Dimmesdale’s apocalyptic sermon, revealing the creatively anachronistic but surprisingly organic interactions between “The Custom-House,” written after the 1848 Presidential election, and The Scarlet Letter, featuring the 1649 Election Day sermon given for the new Puritan governor.

Mark Twain is said to have written Pudd’nhead Wilson (1892) in a pessimistic mood when his financial situation was rapidly deteriorating. This article essays to examine the novel and its background in search of the cause of his pessimism.

The book is composed of two similar stories, “Pudd’nhead Wilson” and “Those Extraordinary Twins,” with the same characters in the same place during the same time period, both of which, however, deal differently with elections. In the latter, Siamese twins run for municipal positions from different parties, only one of them to be elected as an alderman of the city. Meanwhile, in the former story, elections are described in a less complicated way: the twins, physically separated, stand as candidates from the same party, both of them to be defeated. It is noticeable that “Pudd’nhead Wilson” specifies the years of its story: it begins in 1830, a few foreshadowing incidents happen in 1845, and in 1853 appear the main episodes including the municipal elections. This article examines the mid-19th century situation of Missouri State, especially the author’s home town Hannibal, in order to trace his pessimism back to his early life.

Eighteen fifty-three was when the Kansas-Nebraska Act was proposed and fiercely disputed, and the next year the act was approved. The act allowed the two territories to become federal states of slavery but also prepared for the transcontinental railroad expected to be constructed in both or either of the two states which adjoin Missouri State. Railroad construction was a driving force of economic growth on the frontier, which brought forth urban areas including Hannibal, and a booming economy including land speculations all over the state. The story uses the specific year to make readers imagine that behind the sleepy town in fiction, real societies were undergoing economic advancement, leading to the urbanization of Missouri State.

In “Pudd’nhead Wilson,” the grandees of the old community are plunged into tragedy by an urban character, Tom Driscoll, who is reared by a land speculator and, while studying in the East, learns city fashion and gambling, and, after frequenting the big city of St. Louis for gambling, ends up killing his foster father for money. The tragedy represents urbanization in mid-19th century Missouri society.

The author’s father, John Marshall Clemens, who immigrated from the south and ended up planted in Hannibal, had repeated financial collapses due to land speculations, which the very young Twain witnessed. Apart from his financial troubles, John Marshall was a prominent citizen engaging in urban reform activities in the town. It is possible, however, to suppose from reading the novel that experiences in his very young days lead the author to think his own financial trouble originated in his father’s inclination toward speculation, for which, in the story, he seems to blame the age of economic boom and urbanization.

Labor unions today face the decline in union membership, as well as weakening of their bargaining power and political influence. When labor organizes a new union as an exclusive bargaining representative, it is necessary to win NLRB certification elections in the bargaining unit. However, NLRB elections are detrimental to labor and the certification process is advantageous to the employer because the employer has the freedom to express their opinion. Representation election process is one of the major obstacles of organizing workers. Union leaders condemn that the NLRA does not work for labor, and insist a labor law reform to allow union certification without secret-ballot votes. The authors of the Wagner Act of 1935 originally assumed that the Act would guarantee employees to choose their representatives free from unfair employer interference or pressure. They considered the only way to ensure freedom for employees to choose their representative was to ban employers from the NLRB election process. This paper examines the transition of NLRB election rules from pro-labor to pro-employer. When did representation election become mandatory in the certification process? When did free speech rights for employers during certification elections become recognized?

For several years after 1935, the NLRB ruled representation cases in line with the Wagner Act. The Act assumed representation elections as a reflection that unions had majority support. The Board regarded documentation evidence such as card checks and inspection of membership lists as adequate support, and certified unions through these means. In fact, more than 45 percent of unions were certificated without elections from 1937 to 1939. As for employer free speech, NLRB considered that choosing workers’ representatives was the sole concern of the workers, and employers had no right to be involved in elections. Consequently, the NLRB election rules required employers to maintain strict neutrality during the representation campaign. This meant that employer free speech was regarded as unfair labor practices.

From the end of the 1930s to the early 1940s, the NLRB gradually changed their election rules due to the attack from business and their conservative allies. By 1939, the Board began to recognize that card certifications were insufficient evidence, and secret-ballot would be sufficient to provide legitimacy to the union certification process. The Board decided that the representation elections were mandatory when the employer petitioned for an election. Regarding employer free speech, decisions of the Circuit Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court deregulated such freedom, and ruled that employers could discuss unionization with their employees and distribute antiunion letters during campaigns in the early 1940s. In 1945, the Supreme Court upheld that the First Amendment protected employers’ campaign speech. The NLRB, however, still defended the policy of employer neutrality until the mid-1940s. It was after the 1946 midterm election won by Republicans that the Board changed their policy on employer free speech. The Board’s decisions in 1946 and 1947 concluded that employers could express their own antiunion opinion so long as their speech was not coercive.

The Taft-Hartley Act passed in 1947 was a turning point in the labor movement, but key elements of the representation election were already transformed by court cases and decisions of the NLRB. The Taft-Hartley Act incorporated the NLRB’s policy change on card certifications, elections, and employer speech into effect.

The American polity is unquestionably regarded as a democracy today, based on almost all of the indices measuring democracy published by non-governmental organizations such as the Economist Intelligence Unit and Freedom House. It is indispensable for a democracy to have free and periodic elections and to establish political power by the will of the general public.

In the case of the United States, however, elections were not considered essential at the beginning of its polity. Instead, the Founding Fathers emphasized a design of political institutions with a separation of powers that would constrain the public will in policy-making. They idealized republicanism, in which people with civic virtue were expected to play major roles in managing the polity. This attitude was reflected in the US Constitution. Since the Jacksonian era, the polity has been transformed into a modern electoral democracy with institutional changes in presidential and Senate elections.

One of the current major focal points in academic research on US politics is the instability of electoral results. Instability refers to a situation when a “divided government” becomes normal at federal and state levels; that is, when one party controls the chief executive while another party dominates the legislative branch. Some scholars believe that political elites are responsible for creating divided government, although others argue that the situation is simply an expression of voters’ preference not to give too much power to any particular party.

When considering how frequently the appearances of divided government are affecting policymaking processes, we should not ignore the fact that the relationship between the two major parties has also been transformed and become heavily polarized in recent years. Although influential political scientists such as David Mayhew point out that divided governments have not strongly affected decision-making on major policy agendas, their arguments largely depend on aggregated data and case studies from all Congresses after 1946. As polarization increases in recent years, divided governments may increasingly matter.

In order to find out whether the effects of divided government have recently changed, the author provides simple data to show the difference of the ratio of the presidential victories in Congress between the era of divided governments and that of unified ones. It is evident that the presidential winning rate has declined substantially in the years of recent divided governments. Hence American policymaking processes are currently affected by the combination of party polarization and frequent divided governments.

In addition, recent works of political science focus increasingly on the roles of the president in policymaking processes under conditions of polarization and divided governments. This suggests that the active position-taking of the president might have negative effects on party polarization.

This essay analyzes the process in which area studies in major US universities were promoted by the collaborative work between the Social Science Research Council (the SSRC) and the Carnegie Corporation of New York (the CCNY) in the immediate years following World War IL Arguing that the development of area studies in the United States was not simply a handmaiden of Cold War political concerns, this essay demonstrates that it took on much more varied and broad intellectual interests, research agendas, and trajectones.

In the minds of key members of the CCNY and the SSRC - some of whom were accomplished social scientists - there were two major rationales for the promotion of area studies in higher education. First, they contended that the social sciences lagged behind the natural sciences in that the former failed to adopt scientific methods and data, while area studies, as the “new frontier of knowledge,” would be able to integrate various traditional disciplines of the social sciences into interdisciplinary work. The other key rationale for support of area studies was the belief that US foreign policy development should be grounded in and supported by enlightened public opinion of a better, informed citizenry. According to them, there were “some adverse attitudes deep in the American mind” that could block the way to peace; these attitudes included persistent isolationism, excessive nationalism, and ignorance of foreign cultures. Thus, area studies would serve as the antidote to such tendencies, making the nation literate and mature in international affairs, leading to a collective appreciation of America’s international responsibilities.

The concrete foci of analysis in this essay are on two area studies conferences held in 1947 and in 1950 and sponsored by the SSRC and the CCNY, and on an area research training fellowship and travel grant program designed to train and nurture area study specialists. In the case of the former, major area specialists in the US assembled to discuss the intellectual agenda of area studies, the content of which was of very high quality, embracing the major themes of area studies that are still on the intellectual agenda of today’s area specialists. In regard to the latter, the SSRC successfully administered the program of fellowships and grants by furthering the training and research of young area specialists specializing in foreign areas, especially those areas that previously had been relatively neglected by American scholars.

While tracing the concrete words and deeds of key members of these two organizations in their promotion of area studies, this essay places the concept of the “institutional matrix” of inquiry and knowledge production proposed by Olivier Zunz-the historian of modem America-at the center of its analytical framework. It suggests that the collaboration between the CCNY, the SSRC, and various universities fits in well within the “institutional matrix” Finally, this essay suggests that knowledge production in the field of area studies through the institutional matrix composed of universities, the foundation (the CCNY), and the intermediate organization (the SSRC), was a uniquely American phenomenon.